


what it's like to have to go without

by tulipohare



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, allusions to Vasquez/Faraday, mention of Goodnight Robichaux/Billy Rocks, most of them are dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 01:02:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12287955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tulipohare/pseuds/tulipohare
Summary: There is a braid of three languages and a dead man between them, and Red Harvest finds the silence easier.





	what it's like to have to go without

**Author's Note:**

> Canon-compliance before I get around to raising the dead.
> 
> I don't particularly care about anachronisms but if something glaring really takes you out of the story, let me know.

 

There is a braid of three languages and a dead man between them, and Red Harvest finds the silence easier. But he always did.

When he dragged his father, laudanum and soiled, or whiskey and weeping, back to their home in the village, the girls giggled at him. He would be silent and run faster, work harder, ride better.

He didn't have the power-cure to blow bullets away by breathing like Pohebits-quasho, but there were other ways to be strong, to do good. There were war people and then there were the rest, living and breathing with the world, and he could be war people for them.

For all his guns and the bounty on his head, Vasquez doesn’t seem much like war people.

Vasquez holds himself tall now, like he’s looking out over a valley, even when the three of them duck branches and pick through rock trails. No more hunching and running, even though Harvest is sure he’s still being chased.

When Vasquez spots a a couple of longhorns down the way, his face softens and he smiles. He nudges an elbow out into the air between himself and Red Harvest and says “See those? _La doma vaquera_ , friend.”

Vasquez speaks, hushed, about a ride he once took, driving a herd up to Oklahoma City, crossing the Red River. Steers like those, riding to their deaths. Met a quick fearless freedman there. The best roper and funniest bastard you ever seen! You were laughing before you knew he had made you the fool.

Vasquez sighs. His eyes burn candle-steady.

All Red Harvest can think is "You’re a bad rider. How does your ass not come apart?" So he says it out loud. Then he feels ashamed when Sam laughs.

“What is he saying?” Vasquez.

“He’s saying you talk too much,” Sam says.

“Just the right amount,” Vasquez says, but quiets. They all quiet.

Vasquez isn't that bad of a rider. He's just thinking of painful things, and it's better not to when you break into a canter.

Sam stops more often than Harvest would like. In the middle of the day they find a sprawling cottonwood and the horses eat and rest and wander to a stream. Harvest puts his back to the trunk of the tree and watches. His mustang ambles back to him, and he rubs at her nose until the paint that smudged in the water is gone.

Vasquez sits up, and gestures toward her. "What's her name?"

Harvest didn't have a give away dance. He didn't go for a vision. His mother’s uncle was the peace chief, and had pity enough to give him a mare when the elders sent him on his way. There weren't any buffalo or elk left, and he almost had to eat her during the winter.

They came across a black bear just in time. It was angry and confused for lack of berries and nuts. Took a while, but Harvest brought him down.

Harvest pets her once more, and says, with his eyes averted, "Names are for people. Not horses."

Vasquez looks thoughtful, then smiles. "I suppose you are right, my friend."

He starts into a story about a job he took rounding up and breaking mestencos in the San Joaquin valley. _Never used any of those old man tricks. Bite some horse’s ear to try to break him? Ayy, If you’re an idiot._ _A bay stallion nearly kicked a boy to death, but we got that stallion’s respect. Keep at it long enough you show them who you really are, what you really have. That’s all they need, that’s..._

He gestures, and his arms are long and dark and gold. Dusted with hair that stands up at the faintest breeze. Sleeves rolled to the elbow.

Red Harvest looks intently at the contrast of white and black that Vasquez wears. All the rest of them wore things that hugged tight on top, that got crusty and stiff with sweat, but none of them quite like this. None of them sloped like bur oak branches coming together to form a trunk. That doesn’t quite describe it, but the only other picture Red Harvest can conjure is catfish, and that’s just silly.

He realizes when Vasquez pushes feather-light at his shoulder that he wasn’t listening.

“You understand me?” says Vasquez, “Eladio. That’s my name.”

Red Harvest nods, the up-and-down way.

Eladio’s face is thick when he forgets to shave, like a hard brush you would use to clean a horse’s stubborn coat. It catches light when he washes. Even when he's smiling he isn't really smiling. Too sharp.

 

Sam turns them where they need to go, riding days and nights through Dine country on the way to meet “a friend”.

“How many friends you have?” says Eladio, sucking his teeth.

“Almost enough,” says Sam, and for the first time since they buried the others, he smiles and it doesn’t waver.

Red Harvest is glad that Sam’s solid, that Sam has friends. Some days it feels like Eladio might slip out of reach and vanish, and Harvest doesn’t know any Dine people.

Sam sits down beside Harvest by the fire that night and says, “Something eating you?”

Sam speaks his language poorly, but he hears it well, and at this point he’s closer to safe than anyone has been since Red Harvest’s mother.

“Do you ever get the sudden misery?” he says, and wants to swallow it back immediately.

Sam thinks for a minute or two.

“No,” he says, swirls his coffee around in the tin cup, “mine came on slow and don’t plan on leaving. Why?”

Red Harvest shifts, and looks at the dirt.

“Mostly it’s good here,” he says, and gestures to Sam and Eladio across the fire, “on this road. Then suddenly--” he raps two knuckles on his chest hard enough he accidentally hurts himself, “--the misery.”

Sam tilts his head and looks sideways at him, a little surprised.

“Oh yeah,” he says, “You’re a kid.”

“I am not,” Red Harvest says, loud, and in English.

Eladio starts from what was probably a doze and darts glances around.

“All right,” Sam says. He gives no sign of laughing, but he is.

 

The orange butterflies show up, drifting south, and there is more and more night and less day. It’s coming on fall, and that’ll mean rain.

Eladio is close to fully healed from his bullet wound, but after a bad storm he takes ill. Sam says he will ride for the doctor, even though Red Harvest would get there faster.

Eladio shivers and whispers, very softly and purposefully.

"Dios", Harvest can make out.

"White boy", and "Mamá".

He covers Eladio with his blanket and gently lifts his fever-hot head up. Harvest has plenty of water, and a little bit of willow bark. He manages to get Eladio to chew some of it between sips. There's a small weak fight, but when Harvest says "You must", Eladio falls limp, and does what he's bid.

Harvest murmurs a stream of his own language right back, covering the fever whispers. He places a hand on Eladio's head and pets him slow like he's a rattled pony.

"When the old people get close to dying they go away to keep us safe", Harvest says, "but we don't let the young ones die, not the strong young men. We give them bark to chew and mushrooms to put on their wounds to keep them clean. We hold them until they’re better. I don't have the power-cure, but I will hold you."

"Yes?" He says in English.

"Sí".

Hoofbeats announce the doctor's assistant, black as Sam. The white doctor would not be roused.

He produces a jar of bread mold and lemon juice and honey and tells them to give Eladio some tonight and some tomorrow night. Sam nods. It must sound like good medicine to him.

There is a rocky outcropping with packed dirt below. Someone must've stayed there before. They’ll linger until Eladio becomes cool again, stops shaking.

The parts that the three of them are missing echo off the canyons.

In the dark, the second night, Eladio says to them. "Are you going to just keep riding, west and east and always?"

Sam stares at the stars, and Red Harvest shrugs, not sure what he means, or what words might give him what he needs.

“I said I would not be a martyr,” Eladio murmurs, “and when I tried, all I am is tired and running again.”

Harvest moves closer, folds his legs beneath himself, and lifts Eladio's head into his lap. "Drink" he says, and tips skin to mouth.

When Eladio sifts into dreams, Harvest asks Sam "What's martyr?"

“Someone who dies for a cause,” Sam says, head still turned to the sky.

Harvest hums. "The rest of them."

“That's right,” says Sam.

Red Harvest wakes with Eladio’s head on his belly and his own cock standing tall, so he slips out and away to quickly take himself in hand, and then wash in the cold stream uphill.

 

They decide (Sam decides) that they will dip into Mexico on their way.

Trees thin and then break into fields that alternate from gold and ripe to newly sown. Eladio shakes his head and laughs.

“Just feels better down here, eh?”

A little, maybe.

Sam procures some bacon and black beans from a farm family with a handful of scrambling kids. They stare at Red Harvest and he bites down on the urge to scare them. Eladio grins when the farmer’s round wife picks them a handful of a coriander plant with small green leaves. It smells like clean when Harvest rubs it between his fingers. It isn't the worst he’s eaten, and he hmmms over it and stretches.

A laugh sails out.

“You like that?” Eladio says, “You don’t know food, _buey_.”

 

They stay just outside the town a long time. Probably too long. Sam talks to people who know people he knows, somehow, and Eladio works with the farmer and his wife, always talking. He hacks at a stump in the midst of dark soil until he is mostly sweat. When the wife brings water from the well he takes her by the hand and they dance a strange step badly and laugh and laugh.

None of them go into town often, and even Sam only in the daytime, so when Eladio disappears one evening and the eldest of the tumbling children points where the tiny lights glow, Red Harvest goes for his horse.

There’s more light, more buildings and streets than Red Harvest has seen in his life, but by now he has some kind of idea who he’s looking for. It doesn’t take hours to find the loudest place in town, with music and beautiful women who grab at him as he goes by. He understands one out of fifty of the words they are saying, and probably couldn’t even name all the colors on their skirts in his own language.

Eladio is not among the lights and drinks and music, so Red Harvest stops worrying, and begins to fear.

He heads behind the building, mounts his horse, and starts to circle the town.

Then.

There it is again, the sudden misery.

South of the lights and the banners, downhill from the sparse stone road, Eladio stands, pressed against white-blue adobe.

There’s a man (barely, give or take a year) at his feet. Kneeling and moving in rhythm.

Red Harvest’s nameless horse glides forward into the shadows with no prompting.

Eladio’s fists clench against the wall. His head is tipped back and his neck is long, long.

He jerks, silently, and bites his lip.

Red Harvest watches deer-frozen from the hillside. Adorned with knife and bow like a fool, like he was on his way to a rescue, or to a hunt.

It goes on and on. It should be dawn already for how many times Eladio gasps, whispers, runs his fingers through curls that move smoothly back and forth below.

Eladio’s body finally kicks and the boy at his feet rears back, holding up his hand for the pesos, readily given.

It’s no surprise when Eladio sees him and flashes from sated to terrified, to furious.

Shame shoots through him for watching what wasn’t his to watch, ruining something good with fear. No surprise. He had it coming.

He presses a heel down, turns, and rides away.

Harvest knows why he hides it, just like why Billy and Robichaux hid. He heard of a Shoshone cousin up north who was hanged for it. Lots of men hate things they don't see often. And kill them.

So Red Harvest does what is comfortable, what he did when the girls teased him, and he shuts his mouth tight, even tighter. He wraps up in his blanket and forces himself asleep.

 

Eladio looks fearful the next day, and Harvest should tell him not to be, that in his world this is not evil, but he can't get the words through. He talks to Sam in his own language, pointing to where Eladio slumps against his horse, holding his head.

"Tell Vasquez not to be afraid. With my people, to be like that isn’t a bad thing. I will be quiet about it anyway."

Sam doesn't ask.

He relays the message and shock is quickly wrapped up into a laugh.

Later, at the fire, Red Harvest rolls up his courage and fights his longing.

He tips his head toward the town and says. "If you want...stay. No pain from us."

Sam sits up looking like he's trying to read a battlefield, and then says, "You do what you got to, amigo. It's a long road ahead."

Vasquez looks confused, or is playing at looking confused.

"What?" he says "When I have you two at my back and at my front? Never."

Red Harvest bites down on his tongue and tastes sudden copper blood.

 

In the morning, when the heat has started to rise, Eladio kicks his gelding up next to Red Harvest and keeps pace, quiet for a time.

"Your people," he starts.

"Your people think that...that two men...that it is good?"

Red Harvest tries very hard to merely shrug.

"Why not?" he says.

Eladio laughs and it's hard stone.

"We say that God hates it, and will send you to fiery hell when you die."

"We say Big Father doesn't care about that," Harvest says, "but Big Father doesn't care about much in these days."

“Seems like that is so."

Before Red Harvest can stop his mouth with clay, it rushes out, "If you need it, I don't know why you pay."

Eladio is very still, and underneath him, his horse shifts, unsure.

"You won't have to. To pay."

Back home they called Red Harvest a coward, no matter how hard he worked and well he fought. Maybe they were right, because he takes off ahead, to look for dangers, and doesn't wait for an answer.

Later he will punish himself for this.

Robichaux died. Billy died. Jack Horne died, and Faraday died in a blaze of grass and glory. And Vasquez died some too.

But he might have a little bit left.

 

They've all shed clothes on the way south, but Harvest is down to pants and boots and nothing else, and sometimes not even that. After a hard ride and a very hot day he will shuck his clothes, curl up on his blanket and place a ring of rope around himself to keep snakes away. Naked as birth.

Eladio looks now. Openly, he looks.

When he goes to a river to wash himself, Red Harvest submerges completely, and comes up gasping. He keeps a rag and a hard brick of lye soap on the bank beside him, and scrubs.

He doesn't check to see if Eladio watches. He does.

Red Harvest is older than the kid in the alley. He knows he is broader and quicker and stronger. Skin is darker and mouth is fuller. It’s still too easy to imagine it was his knees on the stone. His hands, his tongue.

 

In the night, just once, after too much whiskey, he hears Eladio crying. Red Harvest wakes fully and when he realizes what is happening, moves over to sit beside him and cry with him. White men ( _gringos, buey_ ) and even Sam, they don't cry like this.

Indian tears, says Red Harvest, bitter.

Mexican tears, says Eladio.

Acrid smoke from green wood accidentally piled onto the fire wafts around them.

"That Faraday," Eladio finally says, "not one man like him."

“No,” says Harvest.

"There shouldn't be. One was enough," Eladio says, and laughs and cries and laughs. He shifts and once more lays his head on Red Harvest's chest.

All is very quiet except Red Harvest’s heart. For a long long time.

 

It's not like Harvest doesn't love a bed. Not like some Kotseteka rule keeps him out on the stony ground or wooden boards instead of on something soft. He's known furs and comfort. But somehow when they find an inn in the mission--"those Jesuit bastards," says Eladio--and a room, Harvest fights for the floor.

"No," Eladio says. "You sleep in a bed tonight. There is room for two. Sam shares with that skinny agave farmer, so."

So Red Harvest climbs into bed. He is stiff on his back, and draws the thin blanket up.

"Ay," sighs Eladio.

He creeps in beside Red Harvest, and curls into a bow facing in. The air is cool, breeze through the curtain and it's a little easier to turn and meet.

Eladio looks deeply at him. Looks at his eyes and his mouth and his jaw, looks all the way down him. Eladio touches his chest and says “ _Qué lindura_.”

Red Harvest has sand in his mouth. Back home, the boys keep separate from the girls when they’re getting on to manhood and womanhood, and he wasn't one who the boys lined up to satisfy when he needed it.

What should he do with someone curling in and petting his chest? Talking soft and stretching like a cat when Red Harvest finally opens.

Some plant oil and instruction, and it goes well enough. Red Harvest sits up on his knees and Eladio sits atop him and together they move and bite at each other. It's a little funny to think of all the parts that are missing when they are like this, when the world is down to two, looking for completion. When there are oak trees and catfish and guns underneath his hands. 

“You are no kind of outlaw,” Red Harvest says after, “Your cows and your horses and fields.”

“Perhaps not.”

“You shouldn’t be always riding,” Red Harvest says.

“Hm.”

“Are you asleep?” Red Harvest says.

There’s no answer. No words and no dead men. Just the heavy scent of sweat and sex, cut with a small green sweetness, rolling over the agave and in through the window.


End file.
